An Evaluation of Service Integration Approaches of Business Process Management Systems

In this paper, we evaluate and categorize how five representative, Java-based, state-of-the-art business process management systems, namely jBPM (4.x and 5.x), Activiti, AristaFlow and jABC, realize the integration of services. In particular, we show that the use of domain specific business activities is the currently most sophisticated technique for integrating services in business processes, and describe what they consist of, how they are created, how they can be organized and how they are used. This sheds light on the corresponding state-of-the-art, and shows that, in particular the supposedly big players, have quite some room for improvement.